Hoffman, several of our parents were blue-collar workers. If we had been born at a slightly different time or place, we could have been working beside those employees who maintained our splendid campus rather than enjoying the fruits of their labor.
More Than Friends
At Swarthmore, maids changed our bed linens each week. We enjoyed meals that were far superior to the cafeteria fare most college students complain about, and we dined in the magnificent chalet-like Sharples Dining Hall. As we entered Sharples, we off-loaded our heavy books, book bags, sweaters and coats onto unsupervised racks in the lobby. The New York and Boston women among us found this especially remarkable. Big city girls never left their pocketbooks unattended. We quickly adjusted to the unspoken norm that, no matter how long we lingered over our meals and conversations, when we finally left the dining hall, we would find our belongings safe and undisturbed. Swarthmore was a trusting place where students were regularly allowed to borrow college vehicles for personal use. We made good use of that resource as well.
Yet Swarthmore lacked the comforts of home. At home, no matter what challenges school might bring, we each returned to families and friends. The foods we ate at home reflected our rich African American and Caribbean culinary cultures. We danced our own dances to the beat of rhythm and blues and calypso. Our local black barbershops and hair salons were specialists in disguising our natural hair to approximate European standards of beauty. We attended churches where worship was more social than the solitude of the Swarthmore Friends Meeting House. On campus, we had to create our own community of friends.
Aundrea, Bridget, Jannette, and Myra entered Swarthmore in fall 1966 and quickly bonded with each other in the dormitory. They were soon befriended by Joyce, who was already in her junior year, Joyce’s official “Little Sister,” Marilyn H., and her sophomore classmate, Marilyn A. Harold, who was Joyce’s and Marilyn A.’s fellow math major, became a brother to the seven women. The four classmates cooked home-style comfort foods in the dormitory kitchen and, especially after holidays, shared “care packages” of homemade baked goods and other treats. When we all gathered for meals in the dining hall, we talked about the issues of the day amongst ourselves and with the other black students who gravitated to our table. After breaking bread together, we often continued the fellowship by singing spirituals together despite the consternation it caused among some of our white classmates.
More than friends, the eight of us felt like comrades in arms. We spent a lot of time together with little distinction between our social and political activities. We studied together, supporting each other academically even when we were studying different subjects in different majors. In the self-taught black studies course we designed for ourselves, we diligently fulfilled our responsibilities to do the course work well to make it a meaningful experience for each other. We traveled together to attend black studies courses at other colleges, black activist meetings in Philadelphia, New York, and on other college campuses, and to see black performers in Philadelphia. We planned and executed a host of events to bring black artists and speakers to the campus. We went together to nearby Chester to tutor younger students and attend church, and to Philadelphia to take African dance lessons. Those who could sew even set up an assembly line with sewing machines brought from home and made dashikis for all of the black male students so that they could be properly dressed for a Black History Week dinner that we had organized. By the time SASS was ready to challenge the College by occupying the admissions office, we had already engaged in many successful ventures together. In so doing, we created our own community and proved the power of collaboration.
Black Is Beautiful
When we started college, we were not that different from most “Negroes,” who had been taught to be ashamed of their own physical features and embarrassed by their African heritage. The high school yearbook photos we provided for the Cygnet, Swarthmore’s freshman directory, were remarkably similar. We looked as much as possible like our white peers—women with straightened hair and men with hair cut low. By the time we formed SASS, we thought and looked differently. In photographs taken in our final college years, we are wearing our natural hair. Some of us even went beyond the eventually stylish afro, and created elaborate West African-style hairdos like neat grids with a puff of natural hair in each section. Adding to the permanence of our transformation, most of us went into town to have our ears pierced so we could wear a variety of traditional and ethnic-inspired earrings to accompany our newly natural hair and African-style dresses. More than simple fashion statements, our choices were self-conscious, political assertions that “black is beautiful” and that we were proud to be connected to Africa.
Blackness became a desirable quality in the 1960s. Africa and Africans—leaders of newly independent countries, public intellectuals, and fellow students—provided positive points of reference. They were political, cultural, and aesthetic role models. We identified ourselves as part of the African Diaspora, “Afro” Americans. “Black is beautiful” was our American parallel to “Négritude,” a powerful, anti-colonial affirmation of African values and aesthetics. That concept was most closely associated with Senegal’s First President, poet Leopold Senghor. Like Senghor in Senegal, President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania exemplified the political import of culture. Nyerere gave us the Swahili word ujamaa to signify extended family, brotherhood, African socialism, and cooperative economics. It was a political concept that asserted that a person becomes a person through the people or community. The collaborative leadership that characterized SASS in this era was an affirmation of these values.
In the highly-charged environment of the late 1960s, even the College romances of the young women of our group were of political consequence, whether it was the rare involvement with a white activist or relationships with African students. When a contingent of African students from historically black and then all-male Lincoln University descended on campus for a meeting with us fledgling activists, they discovered among us a group of black female students, each one brilliant in their eyes, amazingly unattached, and mostly open to the possibility of cross-national relationships. The African students were older, more experienced citizens of the world and more mature and sophisticated than most of the Swarthmore men. They were from Eastern and Southern African countries that had only recently won their independence or were engaged in a liberation struggle. Through them, some of us gained a much more intimate understanding of African politics and liberation movements as well as validation of our own activism.
Images of struggle had bombarded us all of our lives. We found ourselves in college in the late 1960s, when it had become a norm for college students to speak out and act out against war, racism, and discrimination. We were very much products of our era. We would make the most of our time at Swarthmore with its opportunities to be independent, responsible, and assertive activists, and most of all, to grow as young black men and women.
The Takeover
Day One
Locked Inside
Members of the Afro-American Students Society took over the admissions office of Swarthmore College today and vowed to remain until they [were] given a voice in policy-making and more Negroes were admitted. About 40 students filed quietly into Parrish Hall, began locking doors and refused admittance to anyone.…”The police were not called in and I hope we never have to call them,” said the College vice president…[he] said he hoped the dispute would be “solved amicably.” Swarthmore has an enrollment of 1,024 students, 47 of them Negro.7
On a cold but gloriously sunny day in January 1969, a small cadre of black students took control of the Swarthmore College Admissions Office. We entered at lunchtime when most employees were on their breaks. While Harold began securing the doors, Aundrea and Marilyn A. approached each person still at their desks and asked them individually to leave. They had both practiced what they would say and how.
No one will get hurt. Please take your personal belongings. We are taking control of the office and it may be a while before you’re able to return.
They were all white women who were much older than we were, and they grabbed their coats and purses and scrambled out of our way into the hallway, leaving their